Tag Archives: Death

In A, a person takes a drug at the start of a party which causes them to not remember that party the next day or anytime later. In C, an em splits off a short term “spur” copy which does a short term task and then ends.

Scenario B can be seen as like A, except that right after taking the drug the person quickly moves to a distant party location. Call this B1. Alternatively, B can be seen as like C, except that the em original is archived and inactive while the spur works. Call this B2.

In my talks on Age of Em, I’ve heard many object to scenario C, but few object to A. In scenario A, few think they’d be stressed near the end of the party, thinking they are about to “die.” Yet many see scenario C as a “death,” and claim the em spur would refuse to do their assigned task, and instead fight fiercely to keep going.

Scenario B is designed to be intermediate between A and B, and so to force a choice between conflicting intuitions. Would you really see B2 as “death” but B1 as no big deal, even though they have the same space time structure of experiences? If not, I think you should admit either that A is “death”, or that C is not. Or explain what matters besides the space-time structure of experience.

I confidently predict that ems see all of these as no big deal, because a competitive em world selects for ems who are more productive, and a willingness to create short term spurs is quite productive in the em world.

Note that this issue engages similar space vs time morality intuitions as thesethreeprior posts.

It saddens me to see funerals where attendees only say generic nice things about the deceased. Such as that he or she was a good neighbor, parent, or professional. I’d rather hear more specific descriptions and evaluations, some of them mildly negative, or at least not obviously positive. The usual platitudes suggest that people didn’t actually notice the deceased very much as a distinct person. “You say Fred from accounting’s funeral is Saturday; which one was Fred again?”

At my funeral, I prefer attendees to signal that they actually noticed me as a distinct person, and that they engaged that distinctiveness to some degree. I want them to have enough confidence in my reputation and the wider perception of my value to point out features of me that are not obviously positive. I want to have been a specific vivid person to them, who they often liked but sometimes didn’t. I’d like them to share specific anecdotes that remind them of my specific distinct features, both good and bad.

I feel similarly about book reviews. It saddens me to think of someone putting in all the effort it takes to write a book, but then even when their book seems to get a lot of attention, reviews mostly just rephrase the book jacket summary, or give generic praise like “must read” and “interesting”. It makes one suspect that most book reviewers haven’t actually read the book. Or if they read it, the book skimmed past their attention without making much of an impact, like an easy-watching TV show.

My first book comes out in May, and instead of having people generically “like” it, I’d much rather that my book had an impact on their thoughts, so that they became different in some way after reading it. I want them to have engaged my ideas enough that they actually grappled with some of the difficult issues I raise. They weren’t just carried along by my entertaining show, but they actually thought about what I said at some point. And readers who engage difficult issues discussed by an author almost never end up agreeing with that author all the way down the line. So the fact a reviewer disagrees with me on some points is a credible sign that they actually read and engaged my book. Which shows they thought my book worth engaging.

Yes, in a sense what I’m asking for here is counter-signaling. Acquaintances distinguish themselves from strangers by acting generically nice to you, such as by dressing nice, being polite, etc., but friends distinguish themselves from acquaintances by feeling free to speak their minds to you and dressing comfortably around you. At my funeral, I want people to see I had friends, and for my book I desire more impact on readers than just “I read some books on X and Y lately; they were okay, though I forget what they said.”

And yes, when signals are ranked by quality, then asking explicitly for a high quality signal is risky, because that can force people to say explicitly “Yes, some people deserve that high of a signal, but not everyone, and not you, you aren’t good enough.” But that is the risk I now take by saying: love me or hate me, but notice and remember me. Respect me by engaging me.

Our basic concept of “death” is binary, so that one is either dead or not. But we often metaphorically extend the concept to a continuum. For example, people who have more strength, energy, passion, and awareness are said to be “more alive,” and those who have more power, prestige, influence, or wealth are also said to be “more” in many ways, including more central and alive. Since sleepers have less of all of these things, sleep is often seen as a partial death.

We have a related mythical concept of “ghost,” which is also sometimes made into a continuum of ghostliness. A ghost was once human, but then died, and now is an active agent with death-related features. So ghosts tend to be cold, sick, in low mood, and have a weak influence on the physical world. They are typically distracted, unaware of, and disinterested in humans. Ghosts are anti-social, avoid groups of more than a few humans, and don’t collect into ghost gangs or ghost cities. They are reluctant to move away from their old haunts, and remain obsessed with old issues. Ghosts are heard more than seen, rarely speak words, and are seen more in unusual viewing modes such as night, shadows, and mirrors.

Slow em retirees share many features with people we see as “less alive,” including ghosts. Not only are they literally closer subjectively to dying soon due to civilization instability, their minds are also more inflexible and stuck in their ways. Compared to faster working ems, slow retirees have less awareness, wealth, status, and influence, and they are slower to respond to events, including via speaking words or coordinating with others. Retirees may often watch and judge working ems, and in such roles may only be visible only in special views.

Thus ems may come to see slower ems as ghostly, and more ghostly when slower. Such em ghosts are real, and with trouble one can talk to them, but like ghosts they aren’t very useful as allies, they sometimes hurt people they interact with, and so since one is usually free to ignore them, that is usually the wise strategy. Since ems must pay for faster speeds, for ems being more alive is more directly related to having more money to spend.

If “beneath” each em are many layers of a ghostly underworld, just how deep does this abyss go? Katja Grace at AI Impactsjust helped me out by estimating the ratio of costs, using today’s technology, to store a brain state and to run a human-speed brain emulation. This ratio equals the “base” em speed as a fraction of human speed. This is near the lowest reasonable speed for ems, since well above it cost is proportional to speed, and well below it cost is independent of speed.

Apparently, plausible estimates of this base speed range from one hundredth of a trillionth of human speed up to one millionth of human speed, with a middle estimate of one tenth of a billionth of human speed. This ratio apparently hasn’t changed much over four decades, giving reason to hope it can help us estimate the future base speed. I’ve separately estimated typical em speed to be one thousand times human speed, and the maximum speed where speed is still proportional to cost to be a million times human speed.

Thus the range of speeds over which em speeds are about proportional to cost is at least a factor of a trillion, and may be a billion trillion. Thus for typical speed ems the underworld abyss of slower ghostly speeds is very deep! If your career and investments go badly, and you are forced to cut back and slow down, there is a very long hill to slide down before you finally reach bottom, where the only lower place to go is to be erased. Em inequality in speeds is immense.

What goes on four feet in the morning, two feet at noon, and three feet in the evening?

The answer: people crawl when babies, walk as adults, and use a cane when old. It seems natural to divide lives into three parts: young, middle, and old. But where exactly should the boundaries fall? One tempting approach comes from the facts that in the US today lifespans average about 29000 days, and people typically marry and have kids at about 10000 days. So maybe we should split life into the first, second, and third 10000 days.

If we split life into 5000 days units, we get:

0 days; 0 years – Birth

5000 days; 13.7 years – Mid-puberty

10000 days; 27.4 years – First marriage & kids

15000 days; 41.1 years – Start to notice body decline

20000 days; 54.8 years – Near kids’ first marriage & kids, own peak of relative income, productivity, 90% still alive

25000 days; 68.5 years – Near when most retire, 75% still alive

30000 days; 82.1 years – Typical death age, 42% still alive

35000 days; 95.8 years – Only 4% still alive

Note that 5000 days is near the doubling time of the world economy.

In my life, I married at 10250, had my first kid at 11500, started grad school again at 12400, started at GMU at 14600, and was tenured at 16540. And today I am 20,000 days old, within a few days of all my kids being employed college graduates. So a lot happened to me in that third 5000 days, and I now enter the last third of a typical lifespan, with expected declining (but hardly zero) relative productivity. Of course if cryonics works I might live lots longer.

Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a simple but heart-breaking story of a dying man. In this passage, Ivan finds it very hard to translate his far outside view about his death to a near inside view:

Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.

In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it.

The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and will all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”

Such was his feeling.

“If I had to die like Caius I would have known it was so. An inner voice would have told me so, but there was nothing of the sort in me and I and all my friends felt that our case was quite different from that of Caius. and now here it is!” he said to himself. “It can’t be. It’s impossible! But here it is. How is this? How is one to understand it?”

He could not understand it, and tried to drive this false, incorrect, morbid thought away and to replace it by other proper and healthy thoughts. But that thought, and not the thought only but the reality itself, seemed to come and confront him. (more)

We could each gain great insight into ourselves if only we could consistently take the features we believe apply to many folks around us, and honestly ask ourselves if they apply to us as well. Folks around us are often boring, failures, irritating, misguided, vain, and, yes, dying. Are we?

In Tolstoy’s story the people around Ivan overwhelming cared about how Ivan’s death would affect them. They were eager to appear like the proper sort of caring person, but in fact didn’t care much. To comfort themselves, they preferred to blame Ivan for his problems, and refused to directly acknowledge that he was in fact dying.

Reading reviews of the story, I find that some (e.g.) also prefer to blame Ivan for his sad death. Tolstoy presents Ivan as a flawed person living a flawed life, and reviewers seem to think that Tolstoy was saying this is why his death was sad. Which seems to me to miss the point: no matter how your life went your death will be sad, especially since most around you will be focused more on how your death affects them than on how it affects you.

Over at philosophical disquisitions, John Danaher is discussing Aaron Smuts’ response to Bernard Williams’ argument that immortality would be tedious. Smuts’ thesis, in Danaher’s words, is a familiar one:

Immortality would lead to a general motivational collapse because it would sap all our decisions of significance.

This is interestingly at odds with my observations, which suggests that people are much more motivated to do things that seem unimportant, and have to constantly press themselves to do important things once in a while. Most people have arbitrary energy for reading unimportant online articles, playing computer games, and talking aimlessly. Important articles, serious decisions, and momentous conversations get put off.

Unsurprisingly then, people also seem to take more joy from apparently long-run insignificant events. Actually I thought this was the whole point of such events. For instance people seem to quite like cuddling and lazing in the sun and eating and bathing and watching movies. If one had any capacity to get bored of these things, I predict it would happen within the first century. While significant events also bring joy, they seem to involve a lot more drudgery in preceding build up.

So it seems to me that living forever could only take the pressure off and make people more motivated and happy. Except inasmuch as the argument is faulty in other ways, e.g. impending death is not the only time constraint on activities.

Case #1: First, you are asked to modify a stock car, making it into a truck to haul stuff. After you do that, you are asked to create a race car. Which would you rather start from for this second task, another stock car, or the stock car that you turned into a truck?

Case #2: A species of beetle lives in a varied and changing environment, and so has a rather simple and basic design. Some of these beetles invade a different and more stable environment, and acquire adaptations specific to that environment. A third rather different but also stable environment opens up adjacent to both previous environments. Which beetle type’s descendants will likely fill this third environment?

Case #3: Over the last decade a group wrote software to do a certain task (e.g., print driver, web server, spreadsheet, etc.) This design of this software was matched to certain features of the problem environment, such as hardware, network speeds, etc. Today there is a need for software to do a similar task, except that the problem environment has changed. To write this new software, would you have your team modify this previous software, or start a new system mostly from scratch?

In all these cases, one makes a system to function in a given environment, and can either modify a complex system adapted to a different environment, or “start over” via modifying a simpler system less adapted to any specific environment. In general, the more different is the new environment from the old, the better it is to start over. Old systems tend to be rigid, which makes them fragile, in that they break if you bend them too far.

This suggests that designed systems tend to get irreversibly fragile as they adapt to specific environments. When context changes greatly, it is usually easier to build new systems from “scratch,” than to un-adapt systems designed for other contexts. Software tends to “rot“, for example.

An empirical prediction here is that species occupying highly variable environments tend to have more descendant species in other environments, compared to species occupying less variable environments. I don’t know if this has been tested. It fits with the Innovator’s Dilemma though, where firms who serve the low end of a product line with simpler techs tend to creep up and displace those serving the high end; high end products tend to be more complex.

Today I’m focused on this being bad news for the feasibility of immortality, at least for human-like creatures. You see, our minds seem designed to adapt to the environment in which we grow up, via youthful plasticity transitioning to elderly rigidity. For example, we are great at learning languages when young, and terrible when old. We are similarly receptive when young to new ways to categorize and conceive of things, but once we have often used particular ways, we find it harder to understand and use alternatives.

The brains of most animals peakin functionality during their key reproductive years, and do worse both before and after. Short lived animals peak sooner than long lived animals. Some of the early rise is due to learning, and some of later decline is due to the decline of individual cells and connections. Some of this pattern may even be due to an explicit plan to turn up some dials on plasticity early on, and then turn down those dials later. But I think another important part of this rise and fall is due to a general robust tendency for adapted systems to slide from plasticity to rigidity.

Thus even if we succeed in creating emulations of whole human brains, “ems” which can use backups, body swaps, etc. to avoid bodily death and decay, we should expect such ems to decay by getting mentally rigid with subjective age. Even if we do not emulate any decline in individual cell and connection performance, nor any age-specific general plasticity dial settings, the mind itself may well decay with subjective experience, because such decay is just intrinsic to mind design.

Now in software design one can often slow a slide to rigidity by refactoringcode, such as by looking for better abstractions to achieve modularity. But the brain probably already has some analogues to refractoring, such as in its ways to reorganize concepts. And even with large refactoring efforts, most designed software eventually gets rigid, so that when environments change enough such software is replaced wholesale by new systems built from scratch.

Similarly, em workers who start out subjectively young, and then learn how to work in a stable environment, may become increasingly productive in that environment, even after thousands of years of subjective experience. But when a new quite different work environment appears, one can probably gain more work productivity by training subjectively young ems for it, rather than trying to change ems who had spend thousands of subjective years adapting to a very different environment.

Today most houses and cars are in principle immortal, in the sense that enough maintenance can keep them functioning indefinitely. Yet most houses and cars are not immortal in practice, because those maintenance costs keep rising to the point where it is cheaper to build new houses and cars. Similarly it might be possible to keep very old ems around, even when they have become much less productive because relevant environments have changed. Someone, however, would have to pay that cost, relative to the option of using more productive younger ems. And as with houses and cars today, maybe few will pay.

If you personally hope to become an em with an especially long productive subjective life, it is probably important to stay general and flexible for as long as you can. Prefer to acquire habits and insights that are widely applicable, and whose value is likely to long continue. Prefer to write, deal with people, and manage complexity, rather than learning the detailed layout of a city or how best to write in a particular new programming language.

Eventually we may find mind designs with a much weaker tendency toward rigidity with age. And we may find ways to transfer some important elements of once-human minds, such as their memory and personality, into this alternative framework. But even then there should be some aging. And it gets even less clear if you’d want to think of such a changed creature as you.

Even more eventually, the universe should get a lot more stable, and with it the environments where minds function. Then there will be a lot more scope for very long lived human-like minds. If there are any human-like minds left at that point.

Added: Stem cells fit this; bodies usually make cells designed for specific places from general simpler stem cells, not by changing other specific cells.

The biggest single charity donation I’ve made so far is ~$100. But now I’m donating $5000 to an exceptionally worthy cause. And I suggest you donate too. Here’s my cause:

People who “die” today could live again in the future, perhaps forever, as brain emulations (= uploads, ems), if enough info were saved today about their brains. (And of course if civilization doesn’t die, if someone in the future cares enough to bother, if you are your brain activity, etc.)

This is probably enough brain info: the spatial shape and location of each brain cell, including the long skinny parts that stick out to touch other cells, and two dozen chemical densities (at the skinny part scale) to help identify cell and connection types. Actually, it is probably enough to just get 95% of the connections right, and a half dozen chemical densities.

Today, the main way folks try to save such brain info is to pay a cryonics org to freeze their brain in liquid nitrogen, and keep it so frozen for a long time. Alas, this approach fails if this org ever even briefly fails at this task, letting brains thaw, an event I expect is more likely than not over a century timescale.

In addition, we don’t actually know that frozen brains preserve enough brain info. Until recently, ice formation in the freezing process ripped out huge brain chunks everywhere and shoved them to distant locations. Recent use of a special anti-freeze has reduced that, but we don’t actually know if the anti-freeze gets to enough places. Or even if enough info is saved where it does go.

The people who developed the anti-freeze published some 2D pictures that lookgood, but we don’t know how selectively these were chosen, or how much worse is the typical cryonics freezing process. Some good brain researchers are skeptical. (Yes, future folk might undo even very complex brain scrabbling, but don’t count on it.) And given my usual medical skepticism, I gotta be skeptical here too.

Though cryonics has been practiced for forty years, its techniques have improved only slowly; its few customers can only induce a tiny research effort. The much larger brain research community, in contrast, has been rapidly improving their ways to do fast cheap detailed 3D brain scans, and to prepare samples for such scans. You see, brain researchers need ways to stop brain samples from changing, and to be strong against scanning disruptions, just so they can study brain samples at their leisure.

These brain research techniques have now reached two key milestones:

They’ve found new ways to “fix” brain samples by filling them with plastic, ways that seem impressively reliable, resilient, and long lasting, and which work on large brain volumes (e.g., here). Such plastination techniques seem close to being able to save enough info in entire brains for centuries, without needing continual care. Just dumping a plastic brain in a box in a closet might work fine.

Today, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, less than the price charged for one cryonics customer, it is feasible to have independent lab(s) take random samples from whole mouse or human brains preserved via either cryonics or plastination, and do high (5nm) resolution 3D scans to map out thousands of neighboring cells, their connections, and connection strengths, to test if either of these approaches clearly preserve such key brain info.

An anonymous donor has actually funded a $100K Brain Preservation Prize, paid to the first team(s) to pass this test on a human brain, with a quarter of the prize going to those that first pass the test on a mouse brain. Cryonics and plastination teams have already submitted whole mouse brains to be tested. The only hitch is that the prize organization needs money (~25-50K$) to actually do the tests!

This is the exceptionally worthy cause to which I am donating $5K, and to which I encourage others to donate. (More info here; donate here.) We seem close to having a feasible plastination technique, where for a few 10K$ or less one could fill a brain with plastic, saving its key brain info for future revival in an easily stored form. We may only lack donations of a similar amount to actually test that it does save this key brain info. (And if the first approach fails, perhaps to test a few revisions.)

I don’t understand why the cryonics community isn’t already all over this. To express my opinions to them more forcefully, I offer to bet up to $5K that plastination is more likely to win this full prize than cryonics. That is, if plastination wins but cryonics fails, I win the bet, and if cryonics wins but plastination fails, I lose. If they both win or both fail, the bet is called off. Any takers?

Maybe … death is bad for me in the comparative sense, because when I’m dead I lack life—more particularly, the good things in life. … Yet if death is bad for me, when is it bad for me? Not now. I’m not dead now. What about when I’m dead? But then, I won’t exist. … Isn’t it true that something can be bad for you only if you exist? Call this idea the existence requirement. …

Rejecting the existence requirement has some implications that are hard to swallow. For if nonexistence can be bad for somebody even though that person doesn’t exist, then nonexistence could be bad for somebody who never exists. … Let’s call him Larry. Now, how many of us feel sorry for Larry? Probably nobody. But if we give up on the existence requirement, we no longer have any grounds for withholding our sympathy from Larry. I’ve got it bad. I’m going to die. But Larry’s got it worse: He never gets any life at all.

Moreover, there are a lot of merely possible people. How many? … You end up with more possible people than there are particles in the known universe, and almost none of those people get to be born. If we are not prepared to say that that’s a moral tragedy of unspeakable proportions, we could avoid this conclusion by going back to the existence requirement. …

If I accept the existence requirement, death isn’t bad for me, which is really rather hard to believe. Alternatively, I can keep the claim that death is bad for me by giving up the existence requirement. But then I’ve got to say that it is a tragedy that Larry and the other untold billion billion billions are never born. And that seems just as unacceptable. (more)

Imagine a couple had been looking forward to raising a child with their combined genetic features, but then discovered that one of them was infertile. In this case they might mourn the loss of a hoped-for child who would in fact never exist. Not just the loss to themselves, but the loss to the child itself. And their friends might mourn with them.

But since this is a pretty unusual situation, we humans have not evolved much in the way of emotional habits and capacities to deal specifically with it. Our emotional habits are focused on the kinds of losses which people around us more commonly suffer and complain. So naturally we aren’t in the habit of taking time out to mourn the loss of a specific Larry. But there are lots of people far from us whose losses we don’t mourn. That hardly means such losses don’t exist.

It seems to me Kagan’s attitude above amounts to insisting that is impossible to imagine a vastly better state (of the universe) than our own. After all, if a vastly better state that ours is “possible”, then the fact that our actual state is not that possible state is a terrible “tragedy”, which he will just not allow.

But if possible states can vary greatly in the amount of good they would embody, then it is almost certain that the good of our actual state holds far less than the maximum good state. This only seems to me a “tragedy”, however, if we could have done something specific to achieve that much better state.

If we can’t see what we could do to allow substantially more creatures to exist, then it isn’t a tragedy that they don’t exist. It is a loss relative to an ideal world where they could exist, but it isn’t a tragedy not to know to create implausibly ideal worlds.